EVERYONE SHOULD GET THE chance to interview Gyles
Brandreth. For best results they should do so in Room 118 of London's
Cadogan Hotel. Once there, all they have to do is sit him down,
and switch on the tape recorder.

At this point, if you want him to talk about Oscar
Wilde, you could quietly disappear, wander down Sloane Street, take
in a matinee at the Royal Court and tea in Knightsbridge and he'd
still be holding forth by the time you returned. (This is a man,
you should remember, who wrote himself into the Guinness Book of
Records for speaking non-stop for 121⁄2 hours.)

It would, however, be a missed opportunity. Because
if there is a more charming, engaging, intelligent interviewee in
the whole of London, I've yet to meet them. Even if you started
off with memories of a Tory twerp in a succession of silly jumpers
on 1980s daytime television, you would be won round. The crustiest
class warrior, the most unbending Calvinist, the most cynical hack
would be too.

He's an expert interviewer himself, has been for years,
ever since he was at Oxford and he got the world's first interview
with the Aga Khan. Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, an
almost complete flush of royals apart from the Queen ("a wonderful
person, but not, unlike her mother, effortlessly charming")
- all have unspooled their thoughts in front of the Brandreth microphone.
He knows how an interview is structured, what journalists wants.
He understands their shortcuts to understanding strangers: the way
they'll pounce on small epiphanies that can change the direction
of a career, spark an enthusiasm, or deepen thought. He'll list
them in logical order, spell out lesser-known names, and generally
answer questions with the tail-wagging eagerness of a retriever
chasing a stick.

He'd do all this, one suspects, anyway. But in Room
118 of the Cadogan Hotel, the Brandreth charm dial switches on to
maximum power. For there he is talking about a man who was taken
from that room to his doom, a man who has fascinated him all his
life, a man he's going to be writing about for the next ten years.
Oscar Wilde.

There will be nine books in the series Brandreth is
planning to write about Wilde (see panel), and if they're all as
enjoyable as his first, they'll all be surefire best-sellers.

Why? Because although he takes some liberties with
Wilde - most obviously by turning him into an equally observant,
if even more flamboyant, version of Sherlock Holmes - he doesn't
take too many. The master's vintage Champagne wit still sparkles,
even when mixed with the more modest Cava of Brandreth's own dialogue.
That sumptuous solidity of late Victorian London is conjured up
with fabulous effortlessness. The plot races along like a carriage
pulled by thoroughbreds, with Oscar at the murder scene - a 16-year-old
rentboy, his throat cut from ear to ear - within the space of three
paragraphs.

Jeu d'esprit it may be, but the idea has substantial
foundations in fact. Introducing Arthur Conan Doyle to the plot
might seem far-fetched, but it is not: he and Wilde were friends,
and met on several occasions. In Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight
Murders, Wilde has his own version of the "Baker Street irregulars"
- the street urchins who often provided the clues that helped Holmes
crack his cases - in the network of rentboys, waiters and doormen
whom Wilde tipped with legendary generosity. So far, so enjoyably
plausible.

All of which brings us back to Room 118 of the Cadogan,
which as all Wilde aficionados know, is where their hero was arrested
on 5 April 1895 and taken off to face the trial that ruined him.

"I've been in this room before," says Brandreth,
courteously setting up epiphany No 1. "When I was ten, my father
wanted to show me where all that happened. He'd brought along a
copy of John Betjeman's poem about it and he read it out and I'd
just imagine it all happening ..."

A thump, and a murmur of voices--

(Oh, why must they make such a din?)

As the door of the bedroom swung open

And TWO PLAINCLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

"Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew

Where felons and criminals dwell:

We must ask yew tew leave with us quietly

For this is the Cadogan Hotel."

A barrister, Brandreth père was a friend of
H Montgomery Hyde ("H-y-d-e"), who had written an account
of the trial of Oscar Wilde that was published in 1948, the year
his son was born. There was a copy in their house in Chelsea, which
itself wasn't too far from Wilde's own house in Tite Street (itself
opposite his trial judge's house: a small world, this late Victorian
upper-middle-class).

At 11, Brandreth went to public school at Bedales,
in Hampshire, where Wilde's son Cyril had also been a pupil. On
Wednesday afternoons the young Brandreth would go across to the
house in the school grounds in which the man who had founded it
lived. Together, they'd have a game of Scrabble. (One of the many
odd things I now know about Brandreth is that his parents met playing
possibly the very first game of Scrabble in Britain). By then, the
school's founder was 100, but (epiphany No 2 coming up) he still
remembered Wilde and Constance ("Lovely couple, very strong
marriage") and told a few anecdotes about him.

Sherlock Holmes also made an enormous impact on the
young Brandreth. The family moved to Baker Street when he was 11
and he read all he could about the local hero; when he was 13 and
at Bedales, he wrote his first play, A Study in Sherlock, in which
young Simon Cadell "gave the definitive performance" as
the great detective.

But Holmes never completely eclipsed Wilde in the
Brandreth pantheon. In his twenties, he put on the world's first
staging of The Trial of Oscar Wilde at Oxford. Later still he would
adopt Wilde's maxim "energy is the secret of all worldy success"
as his own and start working on his Wildean nine-book series. The
penultimate epiphany in this story (for final one, see panel) came
a few years ago, when he read in Conan Doyle's now out-of-print
autobiography about his first meeting with Wilde. "I realised
that my two heroes actually knew each other," shrieks Brandreth,
hugging his knees and beaming.

He's great company, so much so that the only problem
about interviewing him is reining him back from all sorts of fascinating
byways ("as I said to Polanski", "as one of Prince
Philip's girlfriends told me", "it was all just like Lord
Mountbatten and his junior officers" etc) to talk about his
main hero. Once back on track, though, his enthusiasm knows no bounds,
expressed in the kind of swooping diction that finds a "y"
in "superb" or pronounces the second "l" in
"brilliance". Wilde fascinates Brandreth, he says, not
just because of the syuperb intellect, or the bril-liance of his
wit, or the way in which, almost alone among his contemporaries,
he could move effortlessly across all strata in Victorian society.
No, he says, the key to Wilde is charm.

We talk for a while about his five years as a Tory
MP in the 1990s, when he was a government whip and in the John Major
government, as Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, no less. Surely,
I suggest, there cannot have been much room for charm in the cynical,
arm-twisting world of government whippery.

He disagrees. Yes, there were times when his job stopped
just short of discreetly veiled blackmail, but in the main it depended
on understanding the aims and political needs of the MPs under his
care. That's where charm comes in.

Why? "The essential rule of charm is - concentrate
on the person you are with, find out what they want. Listen to them.
That's one thing about Wilde - he was a great talker, but a great
listener too. Then absorb what the person has to say and replay
it back to them. It's like the narcissism that comes at the first
stage of love, when two people will each see each themselves in
each other, when they will keep noticing how they're so alike they
could almost be the same person."

By the end of the interview, I don't quite imagine
I am the same person as the one sitting talking to me in Room 118.
But there is a word for Brandreth's effect on me or Wilde's impact
on nearly everyone who met him. Charmed, I'm sure.

• Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders is
published on 3 May by John Murray, priced £12.99.

Wilde party – on the centenary of his
death

THE idea of writing a series of novels about Oscar
Wilde came to Brandreth in Paris on 30 November 2000. A friend had
booked the room at the Hotel des Beaux- Arts in which Wilde had
died, exactly a century before, aged 46, and had invited Brandreth
and his wife Michelle along for a short anniversary ceremony. Actor
Donald Sinden, who had known Lord Alfred Douglas (“ Bosie”),
the man for whom Wilde had ruined himself, was in attendance, as
was Bosie’s last landlady. Brandreth takes up the story:

“There was this camp blond American clergyman
called Beau – Oscar would have loved that – who presided
over this little ceremony at 1.45 in the afternoon, around the bed
in the room. The man who organised it all turned up dressed as Lady
Bracknell. Oscar would have loved that too. This motley crew raised
their glasses – Champagne, because absinthe is illegal –
and as we toasted Oscar, this elderly voice of Bosie’s last
landlady whispered ‘ And Bosie!’ And I thought, ‘
100 years on, Oscar Wilde is still alive. I’m going to be
bold and write these stories.’ ”

Wilde’s life is so rich, and I have planned
out nine storylines. The one I’m writing now is set in Reading
Jail, but will also have Bram Stoker in it: like Conan Doyle, he
was another of Wilde’s friends. The one after that is going
to go right back to when Wilde was an undergraduate – and
he finds himself at the Vatican, with the Pope and a murderer.

“There’s an international angle too, because
Wilde did those American tours, when he met the cowboys. They adored
him and Oscar adored the cowboys. Out in the Wild West he went down
a mineshaft dressed in a velour suit of his own design, surrounded
by cowboys – he said he’d never done anything as exciting.

“We’ll be able to have Oscar Wilde in
Venice, in Germany, in France – and with my narrator [ Wilde’s
friend and first biographer] Robert Sherard with him at all times
or in a position to be able to tell the story.

“It would be presumptuous of me to see myself
as Wilde, but I do see myself as Sherard. He went to the same Oxford
college as me, collected celebrities, and was a hack who wrote a
lot of books. He died in 1943, and my idea was to have him looking
back on his memories of Oscar. Sherard was also a bit of a ladies’
man, and this helps me in my aim of showing Wilde in the round,
not just putting him in the gay icon ghetto. All the layers of thestory
are there with Wilde, but because the trial is so big, in the past
it’s been hard to see that. But did you know that when Wilde
came out of prison he took on the name of Sebastian Melmoth and
earned his living as a private investigator in France? It’s
true – but you’re going to have to wait until volume
five for that!”